Now deeply into Dylan's Love and Theft - it sounds particularly good in the car. I found myself going back the other day to Christopher Ricks's somewhat eccentric but always entertaining and massively insightful Dylan's Visions of Sin to see what the good professor had to say about those songs off the album he chose to analyse. I remembered from my first reading of the book that Ricks had covered at least two songs in depth, but these segments didn't mean too much to me when I first read the book as I hadn't then heard anything off the album at all. Anyway, I was right about the two songs, which are Moonlight and Sugar Baby, and Ricks, as I expected from one of the great close readers of any 'text', illuminates both. He's especially good on Dylan's pauses in Sugar Baby. Indeed one of Ricks's great strengths when dealing with Dylan is his readiness to take the words in the context of actual performance.
It's odd to think that quite a lot of people think Dylan has a poor sense of rhythm. They can't see (should that be hear?) that he begins where they leave off.
Incidentally Ricks's book Keats and Embarrassment is the best critical text on Keats I know. I was lucky enough to hear Ricks lecture, as a guest lecturer at Sheffield University, on prejudice in literature, I think around 1976. He was particularly good on that old fraud, fascist and genius Ezra Pound.
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